Electrospinning is a technique wherein fine fibers are drawn from a liquid by the application of an electrical charge. Electrospinning enables the fabrication of submicrometer and nanometer fibers from a melt or a solution of various materials (e.g., polymeric or blended materials), and therefore has been widely adopted to fabricate fibrous matrices with highly connected porous structures for filtration, catalysis, medicine, and other applications. The diameter of fibers fabricated by electrospinning can be modulated within the nanometer to micrometer range by tuning various parameters such as solution concentration, solution feeding rate, collection distance, electric field intensity, and the spinneret diameter. In addition, intervention of an electric field during fiber collection, such as by using a rotating mandrel for collecting aligned fibers, allows for a certain degree of manipulation of the fiber organization in the collected fibrous matrices.
Various applications exist for fibrous matrices with patterns created thereon, such as guiding the flow of reactants across fibrous meshes. The requirements on patterns created on fibrous matrices are more demanding for regenerative medicine, in which different cells need to follow unique spatial organization to better recapture the physiologic functions and complex characteristics of native tissues. However, there is currently no robust approach available for rapid and cost-effective creation of arbitrary patterns on fibrous meshes.